The world is no longer at ease

The world has long been permanently at war economically and politically. It has taken only some brave minds to observe and reveal this.

An African scholar, Yash Tandon, was accused of exaggeration in 2015 when he published a punchy book; Trade is War: The West’s war Against the World. Tandon tersely argued that in world economics, finance and trade, the West was busy suffocating the rest of the world and fortifying its monopoly with a many-fingered grip of the Octopus.

The pursuit of political and economic supremacy, backed by NATO military might, has been a spirited preoccupation of the Euro-American Empire for the longest time now. This spirited pursuit of supremacy has been carefully covered up with images of the West as the civiliser, moderniser and liberator of the rest of the world. Some narrative supremacy, not just propaganda, has been deployed to project a messianic West that will save the rest of the world in these times of blood and darkness.

The world is no longer at ease. The economic rise of China, and stubborn political and economic resilience of Russia, has worried the American led western alliance that cannot imagine a world led from another province besides the western hemisphere.

The stampede for political and economic supremacy, accompanied by military might, has pitted the Euro-American Empire against China and its own alliances in an undeclared but real Cold War that has always been covered up by some hot peace, the silence and diplomacy of enemies that masks boiling tensions. Ukraine is only a small military explosion of an economic and political battle that has been going on for the past decades.

The economic and political World War III is fast turning military in the era of the vaunted Fourth Industrial Revolution that has seen powers, eastern and western, testing and displaying futurist weapons that the rest of the world never knew existed. It is our intellectual denialism and political fear of the worst that prevents us from clearly seeing and admitting that World War III is afoot. The lonely but loud voice of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine keeps shouting at the NATO alliance to stop pretending that they are not at war and openly send boots on the ground in his country.

Shy and also uncertain of outcomes, putting up a face of opposition to war, the NATO allies keep pumping in mercenaries, weapons, and alleged de-uniformed special forces to engage Russia in Ukraine.
Typical of all wars, the first casualty of the war in Ukraine has been the truth.

The New World Disorder

As early as 1835, a competent poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, in one of his poems, Locksley Hall, mused about “the Parliament of man” and “the federation of the world,” a world order. Journalists have recorded that more than a century later US President Harry Truman moved around with a copy of the poem in his wallet as a talisman and inspiration for the United Nations Charter that he pondered. At the time the influential British thinker, H.G.B Wells had published in 1940 an arresting book: The New World Order, that captured the imagination of the world and got political leaders thinking and acting in New World Order terms.

The book passionately ventilated on the “rights of man” as what should punctuate the New World Order that the West was supposed to lead in. Wells had become another prophet of his country and time.

President Joe Biden was a true son of the Western Empire a couple of weeks ago when he noted that “there is to be a New World Order out there” and “we have got to lead it.” Visions and fantasies of a New World Order have always been part of the “passion of the western mind” from its “civilising mission” to it “modernising crusade” that drove slavery, colonialism and globalisation.

The trouble is exactly that what is order for the West becomes disorder to the rest of the world that finds itself in the receiving end of western missions and crusades. Because of global coloniality, western peace and prosperity have always entailed war and poverty in the rest of the world.

For that reason, when sons and daughters of the West declare a New World Order those others outside the West have a reason to be very much afraid.

Beware the Weapons of Mass-Deception

What I have called “narrative supremacy” is the forceful way in which the Euro-American Empire deploys texts and images, messages, to perfume its otherwise smelly world agenda and convince even its victims that it is the saviour.

Through what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called “the manufacture of consent” the western Empire Builders are able to deploy texts and visuals to convince all, and their victims even, that they are God’s own gift to the world, liberators and defenders of the “rights of man.” In its narrative supremacy, the Euro-American Empire that has monopoly of weapons of mass destruction, after all, deploys weapons of mass-deception to keep all of us enchanted in the belief that NATO is here to protect humanity not to secure and fortify western conquest and domination of all provinces of the world, which is their true mission.

That there is Euro-American Empire that is struggling for survival and scrambling for supremacy is not just denied but it is totally erased and silenced.

The African Sphere of Influence in the New World Disorder

Like the Baboons that from the mountain tops see the sunrise before everybody else, world scholars have foreseen historical developments from their desktops.

In 2020 two scholars, Samir Saran and Shashi Tharoor, had their own desktop foresight of things historical when they published the book: The New World Disorder and the Indian Imperative. In this telling book they pondered how, as the western New World Order unfolds into a New World Disorder in the Global South, India should position itself to be a world player and not again any sphere of influence for any superpower. That Indian question is true for Africa.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].